CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN READS FROM HER NEW BOOK SARONG PARTY GIRLS WITH HILLARY JORDAN

A brilliant and utterly engaging novel--Emma set in modern Asia--about a young woman's rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with heady modern materialism.

On the edge of twenty-seven, Jazzy hatches a plan for her and her best girlfriends: Sher, Imo, and Fann. Before the year is out, these Sarong Party Girls will all have spectacular weddings to rich ang moh--Western expat--husbands with Chanel babies (the cutest status symbols of all) quickly to follow. Razor-sharp, spunky, and vulgarly brand-obsessed, Jazzy is a determined woman who doesn't lose.

As she fervently pursues her quest to find a white husband, this bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold-digger reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore's glamorous nightclubs and busy streets, its grubby wet markets and seedy hawker centers. Moving through her colorful, stratified world, she realizes she cannot ignore the troubling incongruity of new money and old-world attitudes which threaten to crush her dreams. Desperate to move up in Asia's financial and international capital, will Jazzy and her friends succeed?

Vividly told in Singlish--a colorful Singaporean English with its distinctive cadence and slang--Sarong Party Girls brilliantly captures the unique voice of this young, striving woman caught between worlds. With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Tan brings not only Jazzy, but her city of Singapore, to dazzling, dizzying life.

Born and raised in Singapore, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York–based journalist and author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, and edited the fiction anthology Singapore Noir. She has been a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, InStyle magazine, and theBaltimore Sun.

Photo by James Veall

Hillary Jordan is the author of the novels Mudbound and When She Woke and the digital short “Aftermirth”, all published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. The two novels have been translated into ten languages. Mudbound won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for socially conscious fiction and an Alex Award from the American Library Association. It is currently being made into a major motion picture, which is expected to be released in 2017. Hillary has a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia. She's currently at work on a sequel to Mudbound called Fatherlands. She in lives in Brooklyn, NY, along with half the writers in America.